Thirty three people died “without fixed abode” of OC in February. Their names are:
Mark SHEGICH who died on February 1st in Costa Mesa
Edward MANRIQUEZ who died on February 3rd in Huntington Beach
Irina ZIMOVA who died on February 4th in Costa Mesa
James CARPENTER who died on February 4th in Anaheim
Roy LACEY JR. who died on February 5th in Costa Mesa
Devin VELAZQUEZ who died on February 9th in Anaheim
Fredrick SAVAGE who died on February 9th in Santa Ana
Eugene WILLIAMS JR. who died on February 10th in Newport Beach
Christine BROWN who died on February 10th in Stanton
Gregory CASTLE who died on February 10th in Laguna Hills
Matthew HICKS who died on February 10th in Santa Ana
George LETTNER who died on February 10th in Santa Ana
James FELLOWS who died on February 11th in Huntington Beach
Lydia RODRIGUEZ who died on February 11th in Santa Ana
Lamont PHILLIPS who died on February 12th in Santa Ana
Felipe GREGORIO-GABRIEL who died on February 13th in Westminster
Dawn YOUNGMAN who died on February 14th in Fullerton
James GOODLOE who died on February 14th in Huntington Beach
Daniel VIVAR who died on February 14th in Orange
Zachary SLIPP who died on February 17th in Santa Ana
Patrick MARR who died on February 17th in Santa Ana
Michael CEJA who died on February 17th in Midway City
Roberta CASTANEDA who died on February 18th in Santa Ana
Scott BEHRENS who died on February 20th in Orange
Daniel BIDDLE who died on February 20th in Anaheim
Israel VARGAS who died on February 21st in Costa Mesa
Roman ALTUKHOV who died on February 23rd in Irvine
Brian KOOLE who died on February 23rd in Anaheim
Frank MARTINEZ who died on February 23rd in Orange
Alfonso CISNEROS who died on February 24th in Santa Ana
Tobias FLORES who died on February 25th in Huntington Beach
Agustin SOSA who died on February 26th in Anaheim
Manuel REYES who died on February 29th in Orange
Additionally Steven SCARCELLA died on January 24th in Laguna Hills, whose name was added to those who died “without fixed abode” only last month.
There could actually be some hopeful news in these numbers, though not in the names that the numbers represent – 34 is the lowest homeless death toll for February in OC since 2021. Last year the death toll was 48, in 2022 it was 46, only in 2021 was it 29.
Further, as I reported last month, anecdotally, there seems to have been some movement regarding some of the homeless individuals who we have worked with at St. Philip Benizi since we had about 30 of them sleeping on our grounds in 2018-19. Some of these people, five years after we came to know them, have finally been moved into permanent housing. A few of the members of our parish’s St. Vincent de Paul Society helped them move into their true new lodgings.
However, lest we take too much time to celebrate this, thanks be to God success, five years in the making, in these past weeks we have been confronted repeatedly by how far we have yet to go.
First, one of the people on this month’s list was Dawn Youngman, who died on February 14th, Valentine’s Day in Fullerton. She was the wife of the first of a series of homeless families that came to us for help, now nearly 2 years ago.
She, her husband and a just turning adult daughter had lost their apartment and were spending what income they had – both parents worked, he as a freelance plumber, she while I knew her as a “temp” dental assistant – on hotel rooms. When they ran out of money they would sleep in their van. To move back into an apartment would require them saving up $6000, which since they would sometimes have to sleep in their van, seemed like a Sisyphean task – you push that boulder so close to the top of the hill, and … down it goes again.
Second, I was called a couple of weeks back by another family, which we along with a number of Fullerton Congregations – Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Islamic – had helped with a couple of weeks of hotel stay before they were able to get into Family Solutions Collaborative. The collaborative had eventually gotten this family – disabled man, woman and toddler into a shelter, but for reasons unclear, shelter would require its occupants to leave each morning – again, the man was disabled and there was a toddler involved as well – basically guaranteeing that the woman couldn’t find work. They eventually left that program to try their best with hotel merry-go-round. Every so often, I do get a phone call from the woman to help with a couple days stay in when money runs short.
Finally, a third family, composed of a grandma, a daughter (the daughter having spent time in jail) as well as two early teen granddaughters and a toddler have become something of a cause-célèbre for a number of us from HHROC, OCCCO and the People’s Homeless Task Force OC in the Anaheim-Fullerton-Buena Park area. To get to know grandma is to want to cry. This is a woman who really should be seated nicely on reclining chair, smiling ear-to-ear, watching the Hallmark Channel, and she’s the carrying the family with her limited disability income.
A common theme for all these cases has been that all three of these families sincerely thought that they were in the County’s Coordinated Entry and HMIS systems when they were not.
At minimum, they should be given a clear identifiable receipt, perhaps card, with a clear expiration date to help them know, for certain, that they are indeed in the County’s system and for how long.
Grandma’s family is now in the HMIS system – though both interestingly, and perhaps “for the best” without grandma. Grandma is not physically well and has her own path to take if she’s ever going to get the help that she herself needs and deserves.
However getting said family into the system was a surprisingly difficult challenge.
And here I will call out Anaheim’s CityNet because this is something that both City / County officials to say nothing of the populace should know.
Initially CityNet wanted this family to be “truly street homeless” before they would even talk to them.
That our payment of the family’s hotel stay was actually being used as an excuse to not put them into the County’s HMIS system, when everyone involved (including the outreach workers themselves) knew that this was going to take some time to do so, and then even after they were put into the system, they’d almost certainly be put on a waiting list for assistance anyway, I simply find unacceptable.
Further, I would say that if one’s job requires one to put families with little kids on the street before one would even talk to them, when one knows that even after they jumped through the hoops, one will just put those families on a waiting list (give them nothing) anyway, THIS IS A GOOD TIME THEN TO RESIGN.
Finally, it is important for everyone in the County to understand that the County’s homeless outreach programs AS CURRENTLY STRUCTURED are NOT REALLY THERE to serve the people who are homeless. Rather they work to keep the County’s homelessness programs “within budget,” a wildly “low-ball” unrealistic budget to the task at hand. This effectively turns the County’s “outreach workers” into agents actually working to find reasons to keep thousands of people, including at times families with minors, languishing on the County’s streets.
People who go into the fields of social or outreach work do so to help people. They should demand that they be given the tools to do so here.
Fr. Dennis Kriz, OSM, Pastor St. Philip Benizi Catholic Church, Fullerton.
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